TERROR IN BALI: THE AFTERMATH; Survivors of Indonesia Blast Are Left Stunned and Searching

In the dark and the screaming chaos, said one survivor today, it was sometimes hard to know whether the man who appeared to be running toward him through the flames was alive or already dead.

''Like you look at their face and you can't make anything out; there's nothing left,'' said Jared Kays, 23, a vacationer from London. ''People were missing ears, people were missing limbs, their skin was peeling off.''

On the morning after what may have been deadliest terrorist attack since Sept. 11 last year, the remains of the two discos that were destroyed here on the sunny tourist island of Bali looked as if they had been bombed from the air instead of from the roadside.

The car bombing just before midnight on Saturday sent fire raging through a dozen buildings at Kuta Beach, with its bars and dance clubs. It is one of the world's most popular vacation spots for surfers, backpackers and college students.

The death toll continued to climb today, to at least 184, most of the dead being foreigners on vacation. The State Department said two were Americans. A dozen of the 300 injured survivors were reported to be in critical condition, and another 30 bodies were still estimated to be buried in the rubble.

Today, the survivors described what seemed to be two explosions, the first small one sounding perhaps like fireworks; the next, seconds later, like an apocalypse.

''There was a noise,'' said Hanabeth Luke, 22, of Britain, who said her Australian boyfriend was killed in the fire.

''We were all dancing away, some cheesy pop song,'' she said. ''We stopped and looked at each other. 'What was that sound?' We sort of laughed nervously and carried on dancing. And within five or 10 seconds, voom! Your feet were just sucked out from under you. I was lying on the floor. Everything was black.

''It was crackling with flames.''

She said her friend shouted, ''Don't panic! Don't panic!'' But she panicked and crawled for a sliver of light, and she survived.

Today, dazed friends and relatives wandered the dim corridors of the 770-bed Sanglah Hospital, the island's largest, looking for the missing. They hovered over the narrow beds in hot, overcrowded wards, offering the only help they could by waving small straw fans.

Doctors murmured over bandaged patients with blackened faces, trying to determine who they were and where they were from. ''We just have to keep calm and go from room to room to find out who is there,'' said a harried Australian doctor who happened to be here on vacation.

Makeshift signs taped to the hospital's walls illustrated the difficulty of sorting the dead from the living.

Some were titled ''Have you seen,'' and listed the names of missing people. Whenever one of these was found to have died, the name was crossed out and added to another list titled ''Persons who have passed.''

The names on that second list were identified as coming from Indonesia, Australia, Britain, Canada, Ecuador, Singapore, Germany, Sweden, France and the Netherlands. The United States ambassador to Indonesia, Ralph L. Boyce, said initially that no Americans had been killed, but a State Department spokeswoman said tonight that two Americans had been killed and three injured. Identities were being withheld until the next of kin were informed.

In a wing of Sanglah Hospital in Bali's capital, Denpasar, in which most of the patients were local Indonesians, a hand-lettered sign in English read, ''We need money for buy medicine.''

''Excuse me! Excuse me!'' called an orderly as he trundled a body on a stretcher through a crowd clustered around some of the signs.

The jumbled row of bodies in white sheets and black plastic bags grew longer in a makeshift outdoor morgue behind the hospital. As evening fell, workers used flashlights to try to identify the dead.

''The bodies are coming one by one,'' said Dr. Ahmed Suyudi, the minister of health, as he toured the hospital. ''Most are from burning, and there are other injuries. Some are from burning and fractures. Some are from burning and ruptures.'' He said the hospital's burn unit, the only one in Bali, consisted of just three beds. ''We will install air-conditioning,'' he said. ''We will clean. Maybe tomorrow will be better -- something like a burn unit.''

The Australian government, determined to offer better medical care, sent in a transport aircraft today to evacuate its injured citizens.

Most victims appeared to be young people who had been trapped inside the Sari and Paddy's discos near midnight on Saturday when a car bomb appeared to ignite gas cylinders, setting off a blast that shattered windows for hundreds of yards.

''A huge, massive flame erupted from the floor like a volcano,'' said Sonali Patel, 23, of London, who was in Paddy's. ''Flames were pouring out of the floor. There was smoke everywhere. Everybody rushed to the back steps, but it was too crowded to get out. Then there was a surge for the front steps, but everything was on fire.''

Trevor Gates, 17, of Canada, who was in a neighboring building, described ''a huge -- like insane -- ball of fire, like a mushroom cloud.''

''Everything shook,'' he said. ''The building shook. People fell down. We ran into the street. People were lying all over the road bleeding, saying, 'Help me, help me.' They were completely scorched. There were blind people with glass in their eyes running around screaming that they couldn't see.''

Though investigators have only begun their work, diplomats -- and President Bush as well -- made no secret of their belief that this was the latest and most terrifying of a recent series of attacks linked to Al Qaeda.

''On behalf of the people of the United States, I condemn this heinous act,'' Mr. Bush said today in a statement. ''The world must confront this global menace, terrorism.

''We must together challenge and defeat the idea that the wanton killing of innocents advances any cause or supports any aspirations. And we must call this despicable act by its rightful name: murder.''

The United States Embassy in Jakarta, Indonesia's capital, denounced the attack as ''a despicable act of terror.''

The explosion at the clubs came almost at the same moment as a smaller blast near the American Consulate here that caused no injuries. On Saturday, a suspected homemade bomb shattered windows but caused no injuries at the Philippine Consulate in Manado.

The day's attacks followed a half dozen other bombings in Southeast Asia in the past three weeks. They included two in the Philippines that killed one American soldier and at least 11 Filipinos and a grenade explosion near a United States Embassy residence in Jakarta.

The explosions on Saturday came three days after the State Department issued a worldwide alert for terror attacks. It was also the second anniversary of the bombing of the destroyer Cole off Yemen that was linked to Al Qaeda and left 17 sailors dead, adding to suspicions that the attacks are connected.

President Megawati Sukarnoputri, whose government has been accused by the United States of laxity in pursuing terrorists, visited the site here today.

The Sari nightclub was leveled, with a two-foot-deep crater in the street beside it. Paddy's was a sagging mass of crumbled concrete and melted metal rods. Chunks of glass were scattered across the road and the smell of smoke filled the air.

''The bombings, once again, should be a warning for all of us that terrorism constitutes a real danger and potential threat to the national security,'' Mrs. Megawati said. Asked whether she thought the bombers were linked to Al Qaeda, she said, ''That will be continuously investigated so that this can be uncovered as soon as possible.''

The United States, Malaysia and Singapore have been urging Indonesia to crack down on Jemaah Islamiyah, a group that is believed to have ties to Al Qaeda and is said to be seeking to set up an Islamic state in Southeast Asia. The Indonesian government has said it does not have enough evidence to arrest the group's leader, Abu Bakar Bashir.

''After this, they're really going to be under pressure to deal with him,'' an Asian diplomat said. ''They can't play around any longer.''

Throughout the turmoil in Indonesia of the past four years, since the ouster of former President Suharto, Bali has mostly remained an enclave of calm, thriving as almost nowhere else in the country because of its tourist industry.

Today, tourists were clamoring to leave, some of them vowing never to return. ''It's going to be dead here now,'' said Kutut Sudiarta, who works at a small hotel near the site of the attack. ''We will be hurting. For many years we will be hurting.''

Ms. Luke, who lost her boyfriend, Mark, in the fire, spent the night driving from hospital to hospital looking for him, but to no avail. This afternoon, she could not seem to stay away from the scene of her loss, staring at the rubble that had been the Sari disco.

''I kept running back and trying to find him, but I couldn't,'' she said, near tears. ''He was the most amazing guy, he really was.''

The people who did this, she said, are ''a bunch of evil idiots.''

That night, few people slept. They could still see in their minds, as one man said, ''that bloke next to me, half his face was normal, half was completely cooked, and his ear was gone and his blood was all over the side of my shorts.''

Many spent the rest of the night in what seemed to be the greater safety of the beach, talking.

''Basically, we've all got insomnia,'' said Chad Hollowchak, 17, of Canada. ''Every noise, every plane that we hear, every wave that crashes on the beach.

''If you're going to bed and a wave crashes, you think a bomb's gone off again.''

Correction: October 15, 2002, Tuesday An article yesterday about the car bombing in Bali that killed more than 180 people gave an incorrect name in some copies for one of two discos that were destroyed. The two were Sari and Paddy's, not Padi's.